In reality, the hackers attemted to steal much more, they tried to complete dozens of transfers for an overall amount of $850 million.

The disaster was avoided by accident because the bank’s security systems and typos in some requests allowed the identification of the theft attempts, investigators discovered that hackers failed 35 transfer attempts.

“$81 million was transferred from the Federal Reserve Bank to Filipino accounts while attempts to claim $850 million were foiled by the Federal Reserve Bank’s security system,” Razee Hassan, deputy governor of Bangladesh Bank, told AFP.

“Attempts to transfer money to Sri Lanka by the hackers were foiled as their transfer requests contained typos,” he added.

The hackers exploited gaps in communication between banks at weekends, the operation started on a Friday because the Bangladesh Bank is closed, on the following days, Saturday and Sunday, the Fed Bank in New York was being closed.

The choice of the Philippines as the landing country for the bank transfers was not casual, banks were also closed on the Monday due to the Chinese New Year.

A top police investigator in Dhaka told Reuters in December that some Bangladesh Bank officials deliberately exposed its computer systems allowing hackers to penetrate the systems.

The Justice Department and the New York Fed declined to comment on the report.

The suspect of the involvement of the North Korea behind the cyber heist is not a novelty

“The U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation believes that North Korea is responsible for the heist, an official briefed on the probe told Reuters. Richard Ledgett, deputy director of the U.S. National Security Agency, publicly suggested on Tuesday that North Korea may be linked to the incident, while private firms have long pointed the finger at the reclusive state.” reported the Reuters Agency.

Security experts at Symantec linked the attacks against banks worldwide to the Lazarus APT group which is believed to be a nation state actor.

In June 2016, evidence collected by a senior security researcher from Anomali Labs linked the malware to the North Korean hacker crew known as Lazarus Group.

The expert discovered that five additional strains of malware that suggested the involvement of the Lazarus Group in the cyber attacks that targeted the banks.

The researchers at Symantec discovered that the hacking tools used by the gang share many similarities with the malicious code in the arsenal of the Lazarus APT.

The activity of the Lazarus Group surged in 2014 and 2015, its members used mostly custom-tailored malware in their attacks and experts that investigated on the crew consider it highly sophisticated.

“Symantec has found evidence that a bank in the Philippines has also been attacked by the group that stole US$81 million from the Bangladesh central bank and attempted to steal over $1 million from the Tien Phong Bank in Vietnam.” reads the analysis published by Symantec last year.

The experts at Symantec have spotted at least three strains of malware, Backdoor.Fimlis, Backdoor.Fimlis.B, and Backdoor.Contopee, which have been used in targeted attacks against financial institutions.

“Symantec has identified three pieces of malware which were being used in limited targeted attacks against the financial industry in South-East Asia: Backdoor.Fimlis, Backdoor.Fimlis.B, and Backdoor.Contopee.” states Symantec”At first, it was unclear what the motivation behind these attacks were, however code sharing between Trojan.Banswift (used in the Bangladesh attack used to manipulate SWIFT transactions) and early variants of Backdoor.Contopee provided a connection.”

The expert Aaron Shelmire from Anomali Labs supported this thesis with his investigation.

“Five new additional pieces of malware code discovered that contain unique portions of code related to the SWIFT attacks. ” wrote Shelmire.

The Anomali Labs team conducted deeper research into a very large malware data repository using a set of Yara signature below to search for the shared subroutines.

The experts discovered five additional pieces of malware containing portions of code shared by Lazarus Group’s strains of malware, including the one used in the several SWIFT attacks, according to Shelmire.

Last week, SWIFT announced it planned to cut off the remaining North Korean banks still connected to its system as concerns about the North Korean nuclear program and missile tests conducted by Pyongyang.

The U.S. Treasury is considering sanctions against the alleged Chinese middlemen who facilitated the cyber heist.

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Pierluigi Paganini is member of the ENISA (European Union Agency for Network and Information Security) Threat Landscape Stakeholder Group and Cyber G7 Group, he is also a Security Evangelist, Security Analyst and Freelance Writer.
Editor-in-Chief at "Cyber Defense Magazine", Pierluigi is a cyber security expert with over 20 years experience in the field, he is Certified Ethical Hacker at EC Council in London. The passion for writing and a strong belief that security is founded on sharing and awareness led Pierluigi to find the security blog "Security Affairs" recently named a Top National Security Resource for US.
Pierluigi is a member of the "The Hacker News" team and he is a writer for some major publications in the field such as Cyber War Zone, ICTTF, Infosec Island, Infosec Institute, The Hacker News Magazine and for many other Security magazines.
Author of the Books "The Deep Dark Web" and “Digital Virtual Currency and Bitcoin”.

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